Bow Street
Chapter thirty-seven
Henry
“She has not spoken since last evening,” Hatchett said. “She asked for water. She asked for a blanket. She has not asked for a solicitor.”
“Has she confessed?”
“Not a word, Your Grace. Not a syllable. She sits and she waits.”
They came to a door. Hatchett opened it and stood aside.
The room was small and bare. A table, two chairs, and a single oil lamp that gave the stone walls a yellow cast and left the corners dark.
The air was close and damp and had in it the smell of bodies that had occupied the space before them.
Poole, the younger Runner, sat in the corner with his leather notebook open on his knee.
Sarah Baker sat in one of the chairs with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, her hair pinned neatly as though she were about to bring up a breakfast tray. She did not look up when the door opened.
Henry offered the chair across from her to his duchess and stood behind it.
Sarah’s eyes moved across his face and down to Violet’s, then to Violet’s hand, which was resting flat on her belly.
Her gaze settled on Violet’s face. A faint curve touched the corner of her mouth. It was not quite a smile.
“Your Graces,” she said.
“Sarah,” Henry said.
Henry had thought, in the carriage, that he would begin with the shaving soap, or with the tea, or with the belladonna.
He had thought he would be angry. He had been angry for days, a deep and steady fury that had kept him upright through the dressing, the stairs, the carriage ride.
But now, standing across from a woman he had known since she was a child of six in the kitchen passage with flour on her nose, the anger tangled with something less serviceable.
“Why?” he asked.
She looked at him.
Silence.
Violet began. She laid the evidence on the table between them the way a merchant lays out cloth, piece by piece, without flourish.
The belladonna in the fertility tea. She described the hidden room behind the dresser, the rue seeds placed in the dresser’s path, and how Kit had witnessed them crushed to powder beneath her foot.
At this, Sarah’s mouth curved. The faintest smile, there and gone, as though she had been paid a professional compliment. She examined a crease in her skirt.
Violet stopped and waited for her reaction. When none came, she continued. The henbane on the handkerchief, the note hidden in Margaret’s book. She described the arsenic in Henry’s shaving soap, the garlic smell when heated over a flame.
Sarah listened, her face betraying no emotion, her hands flat on her lap, her eyes holding Violet’s. She sat as she had sat through the mornings in Violet’s room, patient and composed, waiting for the next instruction.
When Violet finished, the lamp guttered and the room was quiet.
Sarah offered nothing.
“Elizabeth, Catherine, and Margaret. They trusted you. Elizabeth—” Henry's voice failed him. He stopped, drew a breath, and tried again. “Elizabeth was carrying a child.”
Sarah’s lower lip drew in against her teeth for an instant, then released. But she swallowed whatever rose and looked at the wall above Violet’s shoulder and said nothing.
The silence stretched. Poole’s pencil was still.
“Your work was ordinary.” Violet let the word sit for a moment. “A competent woman would have known that belladonna cannot hide behind rue indefinitely. Half the quantity along with arsenic would have passed any palate for years. But you were heavy-handed, and I tasted it.”
Sarah’s chin lifted. The faintest colour rose at her throat.
“And the evidence you left behind.” Her voice was almost pitying now.
“A handkerchief stiff with henbane, when any apprentice would have burned the cloth. A bottle missing, muslin still damp.” She chuckled.
“You are a stillroom maid who learned enough to be dangerous and not quite enough to be invisible.”
Sarah’s nostrils flared. A muscle stood at the corner of her jaw. Her eyes moved to Violet with a venom Henry had never seen before. For an instant, half a breath, her lips parted as though something was fighting to come through her teeth. But she held. She held and held and held.
Violet looked at Henry. He looked at her. And he knew what she was asking. Henry straightened. “Hatchett. A word.”
A door opened. Edmund came in ahead of Kit. His hat in his hands, his face drawn, his eyes moving around the room without settling. Hatchett had told him only that the duke required his presence. He had not been told who was waiting.
He saw Sarah.
The colour left his face. First the cheeks, then the lips. He stopped two paces inside the door.
Sarah looked at him. In twenty years of service, Henry had never seen her face unguarded.
He had thought, on the carriage ride here, that the sight of Edmund might crack her composure.
He was wrong. What happened was worse. The composure did not break.
It softened. The hard set of her mouth eased.
The line between her brows, which had not moved through any of Violet’s accusations, smoothed.
She looked at Edmund with an expression so close to tenderness that Henry’s stomach turned.
“Sit down, Edmund,” Henry said.
Edmund sat. The chair scraped against the stone. He was across the table from her now, close enough to touch. His hands were shaking.
“Tell me it is not true.” His voice was barely audible. “Sarah, please. Tell me what the Runners say is a lie, an error.”
She studied him. The lamplight held her eyes, and whatever lived behind them: grief, patience, triumph.
“Cousin Edmund.” Violet spoke gently. Henry placed a hand on the small of his wife’s back. “We have evidence that Sarah killed three Duchesses of Iredell and attempted to murder the Duke of Iredell and myself.”
Edmund stared at Violet. Then at Sarah.
“Why?” His voice broke on the word. “What could you have possibly…”
Sarah held his gaze and said nothing for a minute. Then said, “I was making room, Edmund.”
She said it quietly. She said it in the same voice she had used to say your tea is ready. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him across the table with an expression of absolute patience.
The silence in the room was terrible.
“Making room,” Edmund repeated.
“You promised to marry me. I believed you. I believe you still.”
Edmund put his hand over his mouth and pressed it there. When he spoke, the words came through his fingers. “I was eighteen. We were together once. I said things I should not have said. I did not understand what I was promising.”
Sarah tilted her head. “You did not understand.”
Air seemed to leave the room.
Edmund swallowed. “I would have wed you had I known about the child in time, but I was travelling. And once it became too late, I saw no reason to—”
“No reason,” she repeated.
Edmund’s hand went to his forehead and rubbed side to side. “I supported the boy. Despite you denying me his presence, I provided for him the best way I could.”
Sarah tilted her head as if she was confused. “I wanted us to be together as family. I wanted to motivate you. Is that so wrong to want what is best for my son?”
“But to kill? How many duchesses were you willing to kill before you realised how futile it was?”
Sarah looked away, returning to Edmund a moment later. “As many as necessary.”
His hand flew to his mouth, a gasp leaving his lips.
“Why the duchesses? Why not Henry.”
A crease formed between her eyebrows. “To make room. For myself.” She looked at Edmund. “I loved you completely, Edmund. I wanted what was best for you. Don’t think for a moment it was easy on me. It wasn’t.”
Edmund lowered his shaking hand. “What do you mean?”
“Well… Catherine was a strong swimmer.”
Henry exhaled. His breath came out ragged. Violet’s hand found his on the back of the chair and held it.
“And Harold?” Violet’s voice held a tremor.
Sarah looked directly at her. She said nothing.
Edmund made a sound, wretched and airless, and rose to his feet. Kit followed him out. Henry heard his cousin’s footsteps in the passage, unsteady, then gone.
“Let us go home,” he said and stood, his hand on the chair for support. Violet rose with him and took his arm.
“Hatchett.”
The Runner nudged Poole. They collected the chair for easier passage. Henry led Violet toward the door. Violet’s hand was on her belly. At the threshold, his wife turned.
Sarah sat alone at the bare table. Her hair was loosely pinned. Her back was still straight. She looked at Violet.
“Your boy will be well cared for,” Violet said. “His father will be at his side. We shall make sure of it.”
Sarah held her gaze. Then said gently, “I know he will.” The corners of her mouth slackened. “It’s a shame I didn’t know about your condition sooner.”
Henry heard Violet inhale sharply. He turned her away from Sarah and led her out of the gaol. They left her in the yellow light.